President Obama Issues Statement About ‘The Interview’ Controversy, Mispronounces James Franco’s Name [VIDEO]

It has become alarmingly clear that the scandal surrounding the movie 'The Interview' is a serious one. The FBI has reportedly confirmed that North Korea is involved with the hackers behind the Sony leak that caused the corporation to pull the movie from theaters. The issue has become national news, and is so serious that President Obama made a statement about it today.

When a reporter asked Obama, during a press conference, whether he feels Sony made the right move in pulling the controversial North Korean parody movie from theaters, the President made it clear that he disagreed with their decision. Obama said, "I am sympathetic to the concerns that [Sony] face[s], [but] yes I think they made a mistake. In this interconnected digital world, there are gonna be opportunities for hackers to engage in cyber assaults both in the private sector and in the public sector. Our first order of business is making sure that we do everything to harden sites and prevent those kinds of attacks from taking place."

Obama went on to discuss the protocols put into place by his administration when he first entered office, and stressed his continued efforts to protect the nation from cyber attacks, saying, "We cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like or even worse -- imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended."

The President made some excellent points about the difficult situation, but it was his mispronunciation of James Franco's last name that set the Twitter-sphere abuzz. When naming the two stars of the film, the President mistakenly referred to James as 'James Flacco' -- and no one corrected him. You can catch the flub around the 6:10 mark in the interview above. Obama's error definitely added some unintended levity to an otherwise serious situation, which, naturally, caused James Flacco to trend on Twitter.